White senior citizens were the largest demographic to cast their ballots during the early voting period for Georgia’s presidential primaries, and with a light turnout expected Tuesday on election day, that group stands to have an outsized say in the results.
According to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution analysis of early voting data, more than 43% of primary voters are white and 65 or older, despite making up just 14% of the state’s current voter roll.
White seniors are demonstrating their voting strength at the same time two members of their group are the leading candidates for the Democratic and Republicans parties and when age has surfaced as an issue.
An ABC/Ipsos poll released last month showed that 86% of respondents thought Democratic President Joe Biden, 81, was too old to serve another term, with 59% also saying Republican former President Donald Trump, 77, was too old for the job.
The last Republican running against Trump, before she bowed out last week, was Nikki Haley, who campaigned on the idea that presidential candidates over age 75 should have to take a competency test.
Senior white voting strength in Georgia follows a trend from the 2020 primaries. Although they made up about 13% of registered voters then, white voters 65 and older cast 30% of the early in-person and mail-in ballots in the primary. In the competitive 2016 primary, that group sent in 34% of early voting ballots.
Their proportion of early ballots cast is 10 percentage points higher than the last primary election, even though their share of registered voters has only increased by 1 percentage point.
In the past two presidential primaries, white women 65 and older voting early on Republican tickets cast more ballots than other subsets of age, gender and race. For this year’s presidential primary, they are on track to do the same again.
In 2016, this group cast almost 40,000 early ballots and accounted for 13% of all early votes. In 2020, the number of early voters increased during the pandemic. The share of early votes for white women 65 and older remained the same while the number of votes increased to over 180,000 votes. This year, the same group has cast over 69,000 ballots — 16% of all early votes to date.
On the Democratic side, older Black women are the most active voters. For the 2016 presidential primary, Black women ages 45-64 cast over 19,000 early Democratic ballots, about 6% of all early votes. This demographic continued to cast the largest share of early Democratic ballots in 2020, over 100,000 ballots and 7% of all early ballots. Now, Black women over 65 have cast more than 30,000 early Democratic ballots, the same percentage of early votes as the last primary.
